Surfer on a Wave

Toward the Diamond Head end of Waikiki, near the Honolulu Zoo, is a big bronze statue of a guy surfing, atop a pedestal of breaking waves. This is Surfer on a Wave, which the city describes as:

A Sculpture by Robert Pashby. The piece consists of a life-size young man riding a surfboard on the top of a pedestal representing waves. Located on Kuhio Beach near Monsarrat Avenue.

That page also points out this is a recent addition to Kuhio Beach Park, only arriving in 2001. It's already needed restoration work due to some sort of design issue with the base of the statue.

The leis around the guy's neck aren't part of the design. They're real leis with real flowers. Apparently this is just something people like to do with statues around the city. And not in a mocking sort of way, like other cities tend to do with their statues. From what I've seen, Honolulu is quite possibly the least ironic place on earth. I'm sure they've heard of irony; I think maybe they just thought it over and considered it, and decided it wasn't for them. It just wouldn't be very nice, you know? It would be a rough place to try to be a hipster. Sneering and making air quotes about everything wouldn't go over too well in Hawaii, and those fancy beards would be really hot and itchy in this climate. The lack of hipsters is a huge plus, if you ask me. I've practically got my bags packed already.

Misty of Chincoteague Statue

When I visited Virginia last fall for the LADEE rocket launch, I stayed at a hotel on neighboring Chincoteague Island, and I managed a little bit of exploring while I was there. Chincoteague and nearby Assateague Island are famous for the herds of wild horses, and particulary for Misty, the star of a long-running series of children's books. Apparently the books are enough of a tourist draw that the city put up a statue of Misty in 2006. People who are bigger horse experts than I would need to weigh in on whether it's an accurate likeness, or whether it might be a statue of some entirely different horse, and whether horses typically chase ducks like this, and what they do when they catch them. In any case, it's just one of your tourist options here. You can look at the statue, or if you're feeling a bit morbid you could go to the island's Beebe Ranch and see the actual Misty, all taxidermied up and preserved for posterity.

I actually think this is a great idea, and more cities should do this with their most prominent citizens. Imagine if Memphis had a taxidermied Elvis to show off. It would really cut down on all those conspiracy theories about aliens and so forth. They could even continue making Elvis movies that way, since being taxidermied wouldn't really cut into Elvis's acting skills. Furthermore, I see that Southern Pines, NC is home to the one and only Taxidermy Hall of Fame (which exists, and doubles as a creationism museum). It seems only fitting that deceased famous taxidermists should be, you know, inducted there, so people from far and wide could come and pay their respects properly. I mean, I personally wouldn't pay to see that, but I'm pretty sure somebody out there would.

Bulloch County Courthouse

Here's an old photo, snapped from a moving car, of the historic Bulloch County Courthouse, in Statesboro, Georgia. Or most of it; I had an old point & shoot 35mm camera back then and my aim wasn't that great, as you can probably tell here. A few years after I took this, the courthouse was restored and the exterior white plaster was either removed or painted over, so it's mostly a red brick building now. I think I liked it better before the restoration, to be honest. I thought it was kind of an interesting building, though not quite interesting enough for us to stop and look around the town. I know it's a college town and supposedly is a bit more culturally lively than your average county seat in rural Georgia. Which admittedly isn't saying a lot.

If the name of the town sounds familiar at all, it might be due to the classic blues song "Statesboro Blues" by Blind Willie McTell. If you aren't familiar with it, his original version and the famous Allman Brothers cover are out there on the youtubes. Though I admit that after listening carefully to both, I'm still not sure if it's good or bad when somebody has a case of the Statesboro Blues, or maybe if it's a little of both.

Pics: Brunswick, GA

Here's another slideshow of old 1990s travel photos, this time from Brunswick, GA. That Wikipedia article makes the place sound practically bustling, which is not really how I remember it. We sort of stopped and wandered around a bit, and it was weirdly quiet and nothing was open. It might have been a Sunday, come to think of it. Plus I'm trying to remember a period of about hour or two from close to 15 years ago. And I may be misremembering it, because I remember a weird dreamlike place of enormous live oak trees and Spanish moss and tumbledown gothic buildings and 300% humidity and ghosts and pirates and time not quite flowing in a straight line, exactly. If I hadn't taken any photos, I'm not sure I'd believe the place was real. Even with photos I'm still not 100% sure.

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Flying Salmon

So, a while back I ran into a list the city put together titled "Landscapes for Rain: The Art of Stormwater". Which is exactly what it sounds like: Art that does something with rain, or sends some sort of positive message about rain. Those of you who follow the TV show "Portlandia" will find nothing surprising or unusual about this. It's a little, I dunno, twee, if you ask me, but nobody ever asks me.

One item on the list leaped out at me: Flying Salmon isn't just part of this weird stormwater art genre; it's also yet another example of Heroic Salmon Swimming Upstream, an endlessly overused and abused motif around here that local public art buyers can't seem to get their fill of. Flying Salmon is not just any set of random downspouts, either; it's part of a swanky New Seasons grocery store in rapidly gentrifying North Portland, right along Interstate Avenue. The snark practically writes itself. Here's how the city describes it:

Flying Salmon, New Seasons Arbor Lodge -
Ivan McLean, Sculptor; Richard Brown Architects AIA;
Lango Hansen, Lanscape Architects; 2005
The highlight of the sustainable approach to rain water collection at this New Seasons Market is the rooftop garden above the entry vestibule. 6400 N Interstate Ave., Portland Oregon. More information on the architects at www.langohansen.com.

I actually took these photos from a southbound MAX train. I'd just been to the Oregon Slough Railroad Bridge, where I'd been rained on quite a bit, and I was cold, and didn't feel like it was worth getting off the train for another damn photo of salmon art. It would be hard to beat the top photo anyway; maybe in picture quality if I'd brought the DSLR along, but composition-wise... well, it's heroic salmon atop an upscale grocery store, and there's a freakin' Subaru parked out front. I couldn't beat that if I tried. Incidentally, last December was the 45th anniversary of Subaru arriving in Portland. Back in 1968, nobody could have guessed what a big deal Subaru would become here. Of course they probably figured we'd be flying atomic jetpacks around the moon colonies by now, but I digress.

It turns out that Flying Salmon was created by the same guy who did Rational Exuberance, a big bright yellow sculpture that temporarily sat outside the Pearl District's Encore condo tower. That title, of course, is a play on a famous phrase by Alan Greenspan about the overheated real estate market, and the sculpture sat outside the last condo tower built before the real estate bubble popped in 2008. I'm still not clear on how much of the irony here was intentional, and how much was a fortuitous accident. In any case, I rather liked the art itself, it was just the title I was all snarky about. And to be honest I don't actually dislike Flying Salmon either. I'm sure it's a great set of downspouts and that it's exactly what New Seasons wanted. It's just that it exists in a larger milieu of rich white hipster preciousness, and that's what I keep rolling my eyes about. I've been rolling my eyes about it for years, actually, and so far it doesn't seem to be helping.

Pi, Harbor Steps

Several years ago, Seattle's Harbor Steps temporarily hosted a giant sculpture of the letter/number pi. I think it was connected to the nearby Seattle Art Museum somehow, but I haven't been able to figure out much of anything else about it: Who created it, what it was officially called, where it went, etc. Anyway, I was going to post this on March 14th (3/14, in the US date format) for Pi Day, but I was on a tough work deadline & totally forgot about Pi Day. So then I figured, hey, I can use it for April Fool's Day instead and say it's because pi actually equals 4. I can't seem to figure out how to make the joke work, though, probably because it's a dumb joke. It's barely a joke at all, to be honest. Besides, "pi equals 4" is a longstanding cheesy internet gag, and there's a nice VIHart video that explains how it works:

Pics: Savannah, GA

I recently dug out and scanned a batch of old travel photos, so here's a slideshow from historic Savannah, GA, taken sometime in the late 1990s. It was a brief visit and I haven't been back since then. (The visit wasn't motivated by Midnight-in-the-Garden mania, I hasten to add; I've never even read the book.) Much of the city is a protected historic district, and Google Street View confirms it hasn't changed a lot in the last 15 years or so.

And yes, there is a photo of the Talmadge Memorial Bridge in the slideshow. I only had dialup internet back then and blogs didn't even exist yet, but it's almost like I knew, somehow.

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Shepperds Dell Bridge

As you may have noticed by now, I've been making another pass through my old Columbia Gorge photos and digging out pictures of historic bridges along the old Columbia River Highway. This combines two of this humble blog's longtime OCD-ish preoccupations: The Gorge, and bridges, and the more I think about it the more I'm surprised I hadn't gotten around to this until now. For the benefit of anyone from out of town who's reading this, the Columbia Gorge is where the Columbia River cuts through the Cascade Mountains, forming a wide steep-sided canyon, with a large number of waterfalls where side streams drop into it. It's the only way through the Cascades that doesn't involve a high mountain pass, so it's been a main transportation route as far back as archeological records go in this part of the world, perhaps back to pre-Clovis times. Today, Interstate 84 runs along the Oregon side of the river, and Washington's SR 14 runs along the river's north bank, with busy rail lines parallel to each of these roads. A century ago, the original Columbia River Highway wound its way through the Gorge from Portland out to The Dalles. It was a showpiece of early 20th century civil engineering, as well as one of the region's first paved roads.

The old highway had to cross quite a few streams on its way east, and the state invested more than was strictly necessary in creating attractive bridges to fit their surroundings. The segment east of Hood River, which was built in the early 1920s, features a few bridges credited to Conde McCullough, the famous bridge engineer, and the guy whose designs show up in coffee table books a lot. The earlier western segment of the highway features bridges designed and built by some far more obscure names: Lewis W. Metzger (who designed the bridge at Eagle Creek, among other things), Charles H. Purcell (who created the state's bridge division, and who later was chief engineer constructing San Francisco's Bay Bridge), and Karl P. Billner, who designed many of the Gorge's more famous bridges, like the Benson Footbridge at Multnomah Falls; the Latourell and Bridal Veil Creek bridges; and the subject of today's post, the Shepperds Dell Bridge, which crosses Youngs Creek in Shepperds Dell State Park.

Like many bridges on both sides of the Gorge, the one here is a concrete deck arch bridge. That seems to have been the vogue at the time, and multiple designers went with it independently. So while the Shepperds Dell Bridge is a reasonably common design, it was a cutting edge one at the time, and it's a great example of the style. The setting doesn't hurt either, it must be said. As with a number of other bridges along the old highway, it was surveyed in 1990 for the National Park Service's Historical American Engineering Record. The resulting description goes into a great deal of detail about how the falsework was done, the exact dimensions of joists, later repairs to bridge railing spindles, that sort of thing. It's all there, if you're so inclined. Which is to say that someone who was truly obsessive about the subject could only use this humble blog as a mere starting point. It's almost as if I'm reasonably normal and well-adjusted, relative to this other hypothetical person.

Sheridan Triangle expedition

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Today's adventure takes us to the intersection at SW Naito & Sheridan, probably one of the uglier places I've ever covered here. At this intersection there's an oddly large, roughly porkchop-shaped traffic island. The city typically landscapes traffic islands this size and makes them sort of park-like (for example, Beryl Triangle, 5th & Caruthers, Regents & Alameda, etc.) This spot, though, is just a vast expanse of drab grey concrete, with a few weeds growing up through the cracks. On top of everything else it's just steps away from the noisy canyon of Interstate 405. It's a great candidate for the godawful ugliest, most brutal-looking, least urban-planned-Portlandia-looking space in the city, or at least within casual walking distance. Which is an actual award I just invented. We aren't here for the scenery, though, as ironic as that would be. And I'm not doing this to grab the top Google result for yet another thing nobody on Earth will ever search for, as rewarding as that always is. Instead we're here for an interesting bit of history that will become clear shortly.

Back in 2008, Portland's annual Pedalpalooza bike festival offered a "Worst of Portland" bike ride, and the ride started right here at Naito & Sheridan. The Portland Mercury described it as "Usually Portlanders can't stop jabbering about how awesome their city is for cyclists. This ride, however, showcases the worst and most dangerous routes. Just watch out for broken glass and 18-wheelers." At least one person survived this adventure, and posted an extensive Flickr photoset of the ride. It looks as though from here they headed across the Ross Island Bridge, then down the ramp onto McLoughlin. Then continued on McLoughlin to Holgate, out to the big railyard, over the Lafayette St. footbridge, and back under the railroad tracks on the ooky pedestrian underpass along Powell, and across the tracks again on the Brooklyn St. footbridge. Then back to McLoughlin and the (now replaced) tumbledown old viaduct near OMSI, and then up to a scramble around the Steel Bridge. That was either where the ride ended, or where the photographer stopped taking photos.

A common thread along that strange journey is that they generally followed busy streets designed in the 1920s thru 1940s, when the world was still learning how to design major roads properly. That era's vision of the high-speed traffic artery of the future did not really include bikes or pedestrians or any other ideas beyond getting from point A to point B as quickly as possible.

So how does this relate to the Naito & Sheridan traffic island? If you look at the overhead shot on the map above, you might notice the grey concrete comes in a few different shades, and you can sort of make out where the traffic flow used to be quite different than it is now. Look for the weedy seam up the middle of the triangle, not quite parallel with Naito. It turns out this was once the southern end of the old Harbor Drive freeway, aka Highway 99W, the 1940s highway that Portland tore out in 1973 to build Waterfront Park (which we're still bragging about, forty years later). At the intersection with Sheridan St, northbound Harbor Drive split off from Naito (then called Front Avenue) and angled downhill to where Riverplace is now, and continued through what's now Waterfront Park up to the Steel Bridge. So this ugly traffic island here is one of the last surviving relics of that long-vanished freeway.

Southbound Harbor Drive traffic actually passed under Front Avenue in a tunnel before merging onto Front at Sheridan. The aforementioned seam marks the edge of where this ramp used to be. For a better idea of what that was like, see this Vintage Portland post with a 1944 photo taken at this very spot, looking north toward the Harbor Drive interchange.

It turns out that the long-abandoned Grant Street Tunnel still exists; it was walled up after Harbor Drive was demolished, but was opened temporarily in 2011-2012 while the Water Bureau ran a new water main through it. If only I'd had the proper connections and known the right strings to pull, I would've loved to put on a hard hat and check it out, take a few photos, write a blog post about it, you know the drill.

The name "Sheridan Triangle" is something I invented just now, by the way I don't usually do that, but I figured it needed a name, and it didn't have one, and this was the obvious candidate. It turns out there are already Sheridan Triangles in Manhattan, Chicago, and Madison, WI, so one might argue that having a place by this name is the mark of a Real City. So, ok, that's kind of a silly argument. In any case, I occasionally think it would be fun to do something with the Sheridan Triangle to brighten it up a little. Maybe paint it, similar to the City Repair street graphics around town. That would be the cheapest option, anyway. A statue or a fountain or something might work here, too, but I'm not sure what it would take to de-uglify the area, short of completely tearing out this stretch of Naito and redoing it, building a cap over I-405, and probably replacing a lot of the buildings nearby. That would be a good start, albeit a very expensive good start.

Anyway, here are a few items from the Oregonian database related to this forgotten and misbegotten spot:

• The original 1935 proposal for what became the Harbor Drive freeway. Presented as getting cars off of traffic-clogged Front Avenue.
• 1941 call for bids for construction of "subway structures" under Front, one at Clay and one here. I'm guessing that term refers to pedestrian tunnels like the one at Arthur St., not the aforementioned Grant St. Tunnel. If so, any pedestrian tunnel that may have existed here is long gone, either sealed up or removed when I-405 went in next door.
• A Portland street map circa 1947, while Front was being widened.
• A 1942 article stoked about shiny new Harbor Drive, because it seemed like a good idea at the time.
• A minor construction accident in 1964, in the midst of South Auditorium urban renewal, with photos showing what the area looked like at that point.
• A 1951 photo of a traffic jam on Harbor Drive at the Hawthorne Bridge.

Oregon Slough Railroad Bridge

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As you might already know, a few years ago I sort of stumbled into a bridge project for this humble blog. It started out with the Morrison Bridge, then a couple of others, then I figured I'd go ahead and do all the Willamette River bridges in town. Then I decided to do Columbia River bridges, and somehow ended up doing Clackamas and Sandy River ones too. And now... I guess I'm not really sure what the scope of this thing is anymore. There have been a few trailing items out there, trailing because I haven't been able to get quality photos of them. With the Clackamas River Railroad Bridge, I finally threw up my hands and figured I'd just go with the subpar photos I had, and try to make up for that with a little extra history work. The Lewis & Clark Bridge at Longview is likely to get a similar treatment. I have exactly one blurry photo of it, but it's a long way to go just to take more bridge photos.

And then there's the subject of today's post, the Oregon Slough Railroad Bridge (aka BNSF Bridge 8.8) between Hayden Island and the south bank of the Columbia. The Vancouver Railroad Bridge carries trains the rest of the way, between Hayden Island and the Washington side of the river. It's similar to what the obscure North Portland Harbor Bridge is to the Interstate Bridge. The cool thing about it is that (like its Vancouver sibling) it's a swing span bridge, where part of the bridge pivots out of the way instead of raising when ships need to pass. Ok, I'm probably stretching the word "cool" to the breaking point here, but hey, I kind of specialize in that. Bridge 5.1 on the Willamette is on the same railroad line, and it used to be a swing span too until it was replaced in the 1980s.

I don't imagine this bridge has to open very often; there are a handful of commercial shipping businesses of some sort along the south side of the channel, but most of the channel is just houseboats. Still, I saw at least two people at the bridge's operator booth, possibly for a shift change. So I suppose it's always ready and able to open if the need arises, once in a blue moon. If you're ever doing pub trivia and they ask you to name all the Portland bridges that open, this is the bridge that will win you the contest, assuming you have a good trivia master. The others are, on the Willamette, doing downstream: Hawthorne, Morrison, Burnside, Steel, Broadway, and BNSF Bridge 5.1. Then on the Columbia, it's the Interstate, the Vancouver Railroad Bridge, and this one here. That's the whole list. Feel free to split your winnings with me, or at least leave a comment and say thanks, if you'd be so kind as to do that.

I've had a todo item for this bridge for quite a while. I drove by the bridge a several times but never could find anywhere to park. I had a couple of photos from the North Portland Harbor Bridge showing it way off in the distance, and I almost just went with those. Then I realized there was a segment of the Marine Drive Trail atop the levee from the Expo Center to the bridge, so I could just ride the MAX Yellow Line to the end and walk the rest of the way. This worked pretty well, and I got a bonus look at that weird bit of trail. It doesn't look like it gets a lot of use. I saw one other person there, and he was practically a speck off in the distance. He kept looking back, I guess to make sure I wasn't going to mug him or something. Then it started raining heavily. It could be my imagination, but the guy way up ahead seemed to relax when he realized I had an umbrella and wasn't just trudging along in a hoodie, like the umbrella was a badge of respectability and non-threatening-ness or something. I'm not sure how that works, to be honest.

Ala Moana Beach Park

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Here's a slideshow from Honolulu's Ala Moana Beach Park, just across the Ala Wai Canal from Waikiki, and across the street from the ginormous Ala Moana Mall. Most of these are from the tip of Magic Island (which isn't really an island), while dodging joggers and people looking for a place to watch that day's Aloha Festivals Floral Parade.

The park has a few WPA Art Deco touches to point out: The Roosevelt Portals at the entrance to the park (named because FDR visited in 1934 to dedicate the park), and the Equestrian Bridge over a stream flowing through the park. Both were designed by the architect Harry Sims Bent. Apparently he was reasonably well known at the time, but I can't find a good online bio of him.

You might notice that one of the photos includes what appears to be a submarine. It really is> a submarine, and one that carries tourists in fact. I tried to get tickets for it once, but they ended up canceling for the day due to murky water after a big storm. I've heard mixed things about how much tropical marine life you actually get to see, since it's touring in busy waters just offshore of a major city. But still, it's a submarine you can ride in without joining the Navy, and Navy subs don't have windows anyway.

Parent I & Young Girl

Here are a few photos of Parent I and Young Girl, a pair of Barbara Hepworth sculptures outside the Hawaii State Library on King St. near the state capitol. I had sort of assumed these sculptures reflected the 1960s tiki-Polynesian look. It's a reasonable guess given the style and location. Hepworth was British, not local, however, and said her work was influenced by the ancient standing stones and dolmens of rural England.

There's another Parent I in Toronto, and a set with both sculptures plus a Parent II in Wakefield, Yorkshire. Somewhere in rural Suffolk, Parent I is paired with Ancestor I and Ancestor II. The series as a whole is known variously as The Family of Man or Nine Figures on a Hill. Apparently PepsiCo's New York headquarters includes a vast 168 acre sculpture garden, and it (of all places) has collected the whole set. I actually just added that place to my todo list, in case I ever find myself in suburban Purchase, NY with some free time to burn. Which I suppose is possible, in theory.

Upright Motive #9

It's time for more art from downtown Honolulu. This is Upright Motive #9 (1979-81) by Henry Moore, in a little plaza at the corner of Bishop St. & King St. If you read this humble blog obsessively and never read anything else about art, you might still be familiar with Moore's work thanks to his Reclining Connected Forms at CityCenter in Las Vegas. Who says going to Vegas isn't educational?

This is the ninth design in Moore's Upright Motive series, and the Honolulu one is one of six copies of Upright Motive #9. There's another at Moore's estate in rural Hertfordshire, UK, now an outdoor museum, and a third one at an outdoor sculpture park in Kansas City. I'm not sure where the other three are.

For the sake of comparison, here are a few other entries in the long-running Upright Motive series, which Moore began in the mid-1950s: One, Two, Three, Five, Six, Seven, Eight, Twelve. There's also a series with letters instead of numbers, so here are editions B, C, and D, as well.

ocean waves, assateague island

latourell falls, august 2013

instagram waterfalls

spring flowers via instagram

Three Columns

Downtown Honolulu's Fort St. is a pedestrian-only street for much of its length. Some of the businesses along it cater to tourists, but it's right next to the downtown financial district so there are a lot of banks and buisinesses serving downtown office workers. The Bank of Hawaii tower has an entrance on Fort St., and (like the main Bishop St. entrance) there's a big 1970s sculpture parked out in front of the building. This is Three Columns, by the Italian sculptor Arnaldo Pomodoro. Its Smithsonian database entry describes it:

Dates:  1970.
Medium:
  1)Grey concrete with anodized steel bands, 
  2)polished bronze, 
  3)stainless steel with pale gold and chrome.
Dimensions:  3 columns. Tallest elements: H. 16 ft.
Description:
  Three columns combining intricate, machine-like surfaces with smooth, polished surfaces.

The entry also notes that, like Kepaakala (Sun Disc) on the other side of the building, it was commissioned by the tower's condominium owners association and not the bank.

I ran an interesting post from 2010 about restoration work being done on Three Columns. Apparently the columns weren't designed for the Hawaiian climate, and took quite a beating under the tropical climate and salt air. (I would guess that back in 1970 all "international" outdoor art was designed for New York City weather, not the tropics.) The columns seem shiny enough now, so I imagine the restoration went well and these count as "after" photos. Though I haven't come across any photos of them from 1970 from comparison, so it's hard to be sure.

Moon's Garden

This ongoing art project leads to some weird activities now and then. I was rifling through the Smithsonian public art database a while back, as one does, looking for new todo items for this humble blog, and saw an entry for Moon's Garden, a Manuel Izquierdo sculpture in downtown Portland. I'd never heard of it, and it wasn't on the usual maps or in the RACC database. Then I noticed it was in the lobby of a generic mid-rise office building at 1121 SW Salmon. When I see something isn't really public public art, I usually just shrug and cross it off the list, but I rather like Izquierdo's work, and I thought I'd see if I could track this one down.

So the legwork for this post involved walking in the building's front door, snapping one quick photo, and leaving. Not that I expected it would be a problem or anything; I just figured it would be tough explaining what I was up to if someone asked. I have enough of a hard time trying to explain it to myself and any remaining Gentle Reader(s) out there. Explaining this little project to a skeptical stranger might not go so smoothly. Anyway, I feel kind of bad that the one photo I got has a little motion blur to it. I like to think it gives the whole thing a more exciting cloak-n-dagger feel. (It doesn't, but I like to think it does.)

In any case, here it is. There's no mistaking it; it looks like a smaller sibling to The Dreamer and Silver Dawn. Call be biased, but an Izquierdo seems like a nice shiny way to brighten up any office (although certainly not the cheapest way of brightening up an office).

Last

When I visited Cleveland back in March 2012 for a NASA event, I spent most of a day wandering around on foot, mostly taking photos of bridges & cool buildings. I wasn't doing a public art project at the time, but I ran across one that was just too large to ignore. So here are a couple of photos of Last, a huge orange abstract Tony Smith sculpture outside a state office building, a few blocks from Public Square & the Terminal Tower complex. The Smithsonian database entry for Last explains:

A jagged, angular arch formed with six hollow, rhomboidal sections, 6 ft. x 7 ft., bolted together. The sculpture is painted bright orange.
...
Each of the six rhomboidal sections weighs nearly six tons. The sections were bolted together from the inside at five meeting points. The legs are anchored in the massive substructure of the office building. There is an eighteen-inch access hole at the top of the sculpture. Although commissioned by the Ohio Building Authority, the Cleveland Fine Arts Committee helped select the sculpture. It was budgeted at $225,000. The title comes from the artist's decision that this sculpture would be the last arch he would make.

Wikipedia's "List of Tony Smith sculptures" and other sources indicate this really was his final work, although a few of his designs of his have since been fabricated posthumously, one as recently as 2005.

So on one hand it's by a famous and widely acclaimed mid-20th Century sculptor, and I'm always a sucker for geometric abstract art like this. On the other hand, it's only scored one measly Yelp review, and it's a pretty negative one at that. Haters gonna hate, I guess.